Lovecraft’ın Cthulhu Mitosunda Şiddet ve Dehşetin Çevirisi: Berman’ın Biçim Bozucu Eğilimleri Bağlamında İngilizce-Türkçe Karşılaştırmalı Bir İnceleme

This study investigates how elements of horror and violence in H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos are reshaped in Turkish translation, focusing on the stylistic and affective shifts that emerge during cross-cultural transmission. Drawing on Antoine Berman’s theory of deforming tendencies, the analysis applies a contrastive qualitative method to fifteen selected excerpts from three core Lovecraft stories and compares their translations in two distinct Turkish versions. The study identifies several canonical deforming tendencies but also conceptualizes two hybrid deforming tendencies to account for compound stylistic shifts not fully captured by Berman’s original taxonomy. Findings suggest that while one translation tends to preserve Lovecraft’s syntactic density and tonal ambiguity, the other frequently opts for clarification and fluency, thus compromising the narrative’s psychological intensity and ontological uncertainty. The article argues that such translatory interventions significantly shape the reader’s affective positioning, revealing the translator not merely as a linguistic mediator but as a co-creator of horror experience. By refining Berman’s framework and applying it to genre fiction, this study contributes to broader discussions on the ethics of literary translation, the challenges of rendering horror across languages, and the cultural rewriting of mythopoetic texts.